Studies have shown that unhealthy behaviors lead to more illness and hospitalization. A person's risk of developing a chronic disease (e.g. cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, cancer, stroke etc.) can be reduced significantly when the person adheres to a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, unhealthy lifestyle can be one of the root causes of chronic conditions. Once diagnosed with a chronic disease, the progression can be delayed and even reversed by adopting a healthy lifestyle.
A healthy lifestyle typically includes sufficient physical activity, a balanced diet, no smoking, and prevention of obesity. The growing number of people worldwide that suffer from chronic diseases and the insights regarding the impact of certain behaviors on health and disease progression, have led to an increased awareness in society that adopting a healthy lifestyle is important.
Despite of these insights and the growing number of technologies and services that promote a healthy lifestyle, people struggle with adopting a healthy lifestyle and find it particularly difficult to maintain it over extended periods of time. In order to improve their conditions, patients are often required to change one or more lifestyle behaviors which have become habitual over time. Those changes are generally found in a care plan for helping a patient to live with his/her condition and for improving his/her quality of life. Implementing deliberate lifestyle changes is often not so straightforward and maintaining changes in behavior over time is difficult.
One of the main reasons for this is that a substantial portion of our behavior is habitual in nature and is triggered by automatic processes. Habits are learned sequences of acts that have become automatic responses to specific contexts which may be functional in obtaining certain goals or end states (cf. Verplanken & Wood, “Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits”, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 2006). Amending or changing unhealthy habits is often not straightforward and maintaining changes in behavior over time may even be more challenging for the patient.
Most currently available means for helping a patient include human health coaches. However, there exist also automated systems.
In US 2013/0216989 A1 a method and system for supporting behavior-changing decisions are disclosed. The system solves the challenges encountered in identifying effective personalized behavior-changing recommendations, providing support for behavior-change in real time, and adhering with necessary steps towards an objective. The system can comprise a calendar platform and a messaging platform, thereby providing a user with an array of tools to track, send, and receive information, customized and personalized reminders, participate in a social network, and receive rewards. The system is also capable of building differentiated personalized profiles of antecedents, behaviors and rewards to develop highly targeted treatment indicators and better behavioral outcomes.
This system, however, is based on means for measuring behaviors (e.g. physical activity) and consequences of behaviors (e.g. physiological changes) and provide feedback to the user when the behavior occurs. However, the behavior will actually have to occur before any feedback is provided, which is could not be desired.